iOS 6.1 Adoption On Track To Be Fastest Yet Says Onswipe, With 22% Of Users On Board In 36 Hours

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iOS 6.1 arrived just a couple of days ago, bringing little beyond support for new international LTE carriers and movie ticket purchasing via Siri in the U.S., but it’s already been installed on a significant percentage of active iPhones, iPads and iPod touches out there. Onswipe, creators of touch templates for web-based content, have seen adoption of iOS 6.1 rise quickly, from 11.35 percent within the first 24 hours, to 16.92 percent this morning, and up to an impressive 21.81 percent as of 3 PM ET today.

Onswipe is gathering data from over 13 million monthly active users on iOS, which itself represents considerable growth, a 3 million user climb from last month’s 10 million total active users. That means its numbers represent a pretty significant statistical pool to draw from to gather these results. Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste explained in an interview that his company’s expanded reach is giving the company an even better idea of what’s happening with iOS adoption curves, and that this time around, people are upgrading faster than ever.

Consider that when Apple released its iOS 6 update, it took a week for 44.58 percent of users to get on board. iOS 6.1 is growing at a faster rate, and looks to be on track to top that should its momentum continue. Why? According to Baptiste, it’s likely due to the fact that Apple’s over-the-air update mechanism has been out in the wild for a while now (it’s been built-in to iOS since iOS 5 arrived in October, 2011), meaning users have had time to get comfortable with it and know more or less how the process works.

The fact that users are comfortable enough with the OTA update mechanism to upgrade almost immediately is great news for developers, both of native apps and of web-based mobile-friendly platforms like Onswipe’s since it means that they can create experiences that will be the same for a larger number of customers at once, without having to take into account different software versions with idiosyncratic quirks. Android, by comparison, has just 10 percent of users on Jelly Bean, which was released in July 2012, so it’s clear that Apple’s still way out ahead of the competition in terms of making sure developers don’t face a fragmentation issue.